During the 2020 presidential election, many of President Donald Trump’s critics — from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives — warned that democracy itself was on the line in the United States and that Trump would become even more dangerously authoritarian during a second term. Trump was defeated by President-elect Joe Biden, but journalist Jeff Greenfield — in an op-ed published in Politico this week — isn’t so sure that U.S. democracy came out of the election unscathed.
“That breeze you felt recently was a national sigh of relief that the 2020 election might finally, at long last, be over,” Greenfield writes. “Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the other close states have, or soon will have, certified the results. Judges have unceremoniously thrown out the dubious legal claims that thousands, or hundreds of thousands or millions of votes should be disallowed….. The guardrails held, right?”
But Greenfield isn’t so sure. Continue reading.